Politics and Anxiety in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan

Abstract

Politics and Anxiety in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan William W. Sokoloff (bio) Abstract My essay establishes the difference between fear and anxiety in Leviathan and traces the political implications of this distinction. Through immanent critique, I demonstrate that anxiety, not fear, is the fundamental problem Hobbes addressed. Hobbes eradicates anxiety through fear of the state which replaces the cause of anxiety, the future, with a tangible object of fear—the Commonwealth. I detect a hostility to politics in Leviathan which is the result of the way Hobbes theorizes both fear and anxiety. I argue, in contrast to Hobbes, that anxiety is not only essential to the human condition but is the sine qua non of the political itself. The active cultivation of anxiety opens the political to risk, possibility, and contingency, but we have to learn to live with, not against, anxiety. Leviathan (1651)[1] is famous for its account of fear. In order to achieve political tranquility, humans replace fear of each other with fear of the state. Fear stabilizes subjectivity and this makes the Commonwealth possible. But this claim only captures part of the picture. This essay establishes the difference between fear and anxiety and traces the political implications of this distinction. While the centrality of fear has received substantial commentary,[2] I argue that anxiety, not fear, is the fundamental problem in Leviathan although it has received little analysis.[3] A lot is at stake in this distinction. Investigating anxiety may not only provide access to a new interpretation of Hobbes, it may also stimulate thought about political possibilities foreclosed by Hobbes’s politics of fear. As we will see, Hobbes seeks to eradicate anxiety through fear of the state which replaces the cause of anxiety, the future, with a tangible object of fear—the Commonwealth. Even though Hobbes infrequently deploys the term, anxiety is connected to a network of fundamental concepts in Leviathan including law, causality, cognition, the future, sensibility, and the possibility of vision or foresight. It also names the breakdown of his empiricist conception of experience because anxiety disrupts the metaphysical foundation that is articulated by Hobbes in the section titled “Of Man” that grounds the Commonwealth in a determinist empiricist doctrine that locates the origin of all feelings, thoughts, and actions in the realm of sensibility. Anxiety irritates this foundation because it is both inside and outside of sensibility; it is a feeling that is caused by nothing in particular. Anxiety, we will see, is a sign of the gap that separates sensibility from the sphere of cognition; this gap is impossible to bridge with a representation. There are more reasons why we should examine the distinction between fear and anxiety. The first one involves a faithfulness to the text. Hobbes valued clear definitions because the possibility of the Commonwealth presupposed the consistent, and non-interchangeable, use of language. Given Hobbes’s own emphasis on the consistent use of language, we ought to ask ourselves what the difference between fear and anxiety might be.[4] Second, the distinction between fear and anxiety has proven to be important for continental philosophy. Both Soren Kierkegaard (1844) and Martin Heidegger (1926), for example, have emphasized the importance of anxiety, insofar as it is related to freedom, and have sought to maintain a strict separation of fear from anxiety.[5] Sigmund Freud (1917) claimed that “the problem of anxiety is a nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence.”[6] Perhaps new light could be shed on anxiety by exploring the way not only Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Freud conceived it but Hobbes too. Finally, anxiety is important to the quandaries, difficulties, and aporias of politics. Politics is not about procedures and rules, but rather risk, upheaval, crisis, and the destablization of foundations; that is what gives the political meaning and reality. Anxiety, then, is inseparable from the surprise inherent to all truly political moments. For this reason, we ought to consider not only whether anxiety is essential to the human condition, but whether it is also the sine qua non of the political itself. Hobbes makes...